When it comes to those kinds of analytics, marketers often had to rely on Snapchat's internal data. That comes with its own issues.

Internally, Snapchat counts a video "view" as soon as it appears on a user's screen — even if they only look at it for less than a second. In contrast, the industry standard for video viewability is that 2 consecutive seconds are watched and at least 50% of the video frame is on the screen.

With Moat, marketers (in the beta test, at least) can now make an apples-to-apples comparison between their Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram ads, the analytics company's CEO Jonah Goodhart explained to Business Insider.

As part of the partnership deal, Moat is also rolling out a few new metrics to its Moat Score for Video (a score from 0-100 so marketers can benchmark the performance of their ads across platform,) including the industry-standard two-second viewability measure, exposure time, whether the sound was turned on, and something called "screen real estate," which determines whether the ad was viewed in the optimum placement on a user's screen. Those metrics will also now be available across all the other platforms Moat has partnerships with.

Snapchat is also going to offer marketers the option to link Moat analytics with its other third-party analytics partners, so they can determine whether their ad had positive business results — such as lifts in brand resonance.

Snapchat is taking measurement "very seriously"

Goodhart said "mutual" discussions between Moat and Snapchat's chief strategy officer Imran Khan had been going on for several months before the deal was announced.

"The impression I got was that he was taking this very seriously," Goodhart said. "They're thinking about it the right way. They've raised a lot of money, it's a huge platform that's growing fast, and they need to put the right pieces in place. I'm very happy to work with Imran directly and happy that he's personally focused on this because there's obviously a lot of things on his plate."

Snapchat's Khan said in a statement: "Advertisers are asking for a clear definition of a video view. We are partnering with Moat to bring standard viewability measurement to Snapchat, and support Moat as they move the industry forward by delivering a new metric that measures sight, sound, and motion of a video."

In addition to the Moat deal, Snapchat also announced on Thursday it had formed a partnership with Google's DoubleClick that allows advertisers to tag their Snapchat videos and assess their performance on their DoubleClick Digital Marketing dashboards. Again, it means marketers can assess how Snapchat is performing versus the other platforms they advertise on — and it allows them to do that within another platform they have experience and trust in using.

Snapchat takes a swipe at Facebook

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

On Thursday, Snapchat also released the results of a study conducted by MediaScience that used eye tracking, biometric responses, and surveys to understand how 320 people in a lab setting reacted to video ads.

The study said Snapchat video ads commanded "over twice the visual attention of Facebook ads, over 1.5x the visual attention of Instagram ads, and 1.3x the visual attention of YouTube ads."

Snapchat's data also shows that two-thirds of its video snaps are consumed with the audio on — an obvious comparison to Facebook, where videos in the news feed autoplay silently by default. More than 10 billion videos are viewed every day on Snapchat.

In another swipe at its competitors, Snapchat said a Millward Brown study of 100 Snapchat campaigns found its video ads performed: